Force10 Networks today announced its customer, the National Center for Data Mining (NCDM) at the University of Illinois, Chicago (UIC), recently won the Bandwidth Challenge held at the International Supercomputing Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC09). The NCDM utilized the Force10 S-Series S2410 data center 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) switch to demonstrate three applications that show efficient bandwidth utilization in distributed data-intensive applications.

“Achieving the high levels of sustained bandwidth without measurable latency was crucial to successfully meeting our objectives and winning the challenge,” says Yunhong Gu, Ph.D., research scientist at the NCDM, UIC. “Force10’s participation was pivotal, not just in providing the high performance S-Series switch for the test, but by helping us to quickly configure the device as part of the test network.”

During the challenge, NCDM conducted three demonstrations. The first demo consisted of processing very large datasets over 256 servers in four data centers connected by high-speed WANs. The data was moved at more than 100Gb/sec among participating nodes. The second bandwidth demo conducted was a cloud-based, image-rendering application that provided very high image resolution visualization via long-distance Infiniband and IPv6. The third demo highlighted a lightweight UDT variant called UDX, which transfers data at 9.xGb/s using a single connection over a 10Gb/sec network with 200ms round-trip time.

To perform these bandwidth demonstrations, the NCDM required an ultra low latency interconnect switch for this high performance computing environment that could easily link into 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE) switches. The school called on Force10 Networks to provide its S2410 data center 10 GbE switch, offering switching latency as low as 300 ns under full load with 64 byte to 10,240 byte frames. In a 1-RU form factor, the S2410 offers 24 line-rate 10 GbE ports and a switching fabric capacity of 480 Gbps and forwarding capacity of 360 Mpps.

“When running applications in High Performance Cluster Computing environments such as this challenge, success is not simply tied to moving the most data as fast as possible, but how the network reacts to bottlenecks,” says Steve Garrison, vice president of marketing, Force10 Networks. “We’re excited that NCDM leveraged the S-Series to win its challenge as it is specifically designed to enable network capacity utilization by minimizing performance bottlenecks even during heavy traffic.”